"The Official Portrait of Miss InDiana"

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Wayne published this letter in the comments over on Abdul's blog. It's re-print worthy! --Melyssa for HFFT

Dear State Representatives,

While you wheel and deal with our monies, ensuring a future of more enslavement and decrying the other party as being unreasonable, we are starting to realize that the Libertarian Party is the only political party of reason.

Please understand, the vast majority of Americans now consider themselves to be a person without a political party. We take our time to read up on the bills (more than even yourself) and cross reference your voting records. We know where you live, go to church, shop and play. Yes, you can say we are the eyes and ears of our community filled by sharks and vipers ready to strike at the feet of us taxpayers and we are armed with a new gun which will revolutionize our ability to ensure you will never win office again.

Say hello to my gun. It's a fine piece of equipment which doesn't fire bullets like a normal gun, but rather, it records video and audio that is easily uploaded to YouTube. This technology is much more powerful than a single crazy man shooting up an office because he knows his government is a bunch of traitors and is quite easy to conceal.

We plan on using this gun for a number of years while watching you. We even plan on making snazzy campaign commercials showing the public where you lie and cheat them out of their hard earned dollars. In time, you will understand that you cannot escape the power of this weapon even as you try to intimidate us by putting your own "guns" in every public place.

Give up, you've lost the battle. Even the media has realized that they are not the only one's wielding this powerful weapon and they oftentimes feel quite consumed that a lowly blog gets more people talking points in our community than their news story which is filled with fluff. Good luck in your escapades for you're going to need it and remember, our video guns will be watching you. ;)

Sincerely,

Mr. Shoot Back (with video only)

Note: This article is written in sarcasm. The writer does not encourage or endorse any violence upon anyone-including our elected idiots.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

"Tonight will be a busy school meeting schedule. The superintendent’s raise will be contained in the first issue of business: Consent Agenda and contained within Item 3. “Approval of Human Resources Report” The board will be asked to approve everything in the Consent Agenda -- considered along with the water bill – by simple voice vote without discussion. "

IMMEDIATE ACTION NEEDED! BOARD MEETING TOMORROW! Please notify everyone you know via your email and social media networks and ask school board members Tony Dzwonar and Wanda Spann Roddy and tell them you expect for them to vote against Mervilde's proposed pay increase.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

click to enlarge photosNew Signage at Indianapolis Public School Building

"Excellence, Scholarship, Respect, Courage...Discover IPS"

This would be funny if:1. IPS was not one of the worst school systems in the country2. IPS did not fail the majority of our city's students3. IPS did not employ one educrat administrator for every three teachers at substantially higher salaries than the teachers earn4. IPS did not fire a popular and excellent principal, Jeff White5. IPS did not fight the advance of charter schools which perform better and spend less money6. This falsely advertised travesty did not cost Marion County taxpayers 51% of our property tax bills!7. Our tax dollars were not used to pay for this propaganda

Hat tip to tax activist Penny Bigelow for compiling this information concerning who to contact to put a stop to pay-to-play politics in Indianapolis. At a time when our cities, states, and country are in fiscal crisis, our elected officials (and appointees) should be more concerned with saving taxpayer dollars, than political cronyism. Sadly, most of them are not.

Penny writes:Since Indiana dismantled the AEPA no-bid roofing scheme, “consultants” have been working with friendly people to allegedly write tight specifications to favor the Tremco roofing materials. This allows the company/governmental agency to declare only one company has met the bid specs so they are awarded the bid. It is extremely rare that another company is ever awarded the bid – usually when the salesman has been able to convince the buyer that his product/service is better than specified. The buyer must write a justification report when he wants to accept a different bid – something that many buyers are too lazy or too complacent to do. And lord help the underling who goes against his superiors…

Tremco, an Ohio company, has been very active in Indiana for many years and is now, finally, in the spotlight for such schemes in many states, allegedly overcharging by MANY hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet, when these Tremco allegations surfaced, I questioned Superintendent Mervilde in a public Board meeting more than a year ago. He defended MSDWT’s no-bid practice of using the Wilson Center, which was, at the time, a State agency which had only one roofing contractor, TREMCO! So much for open bidding in MSDWT, with general specs…

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE:My husband and I have experienced such tactics firsthand. We often ran into such unfair dastardly business tactics in our business when we were quoting and bidding on equipment. We learned quickly not to waste our time with most governmental bidding schemes. If the specs were slanted to one company, we did not bid. Only if the specs were written to accommodate general bidding did we participate. Even then, it was not a level playing field; many times the customer already knew what he wanted and justified it in his purchase report.

This scheme for limiting bidders/bids cost the government and therefore cost the taxpayers plenty of money. It has happened in a wide variety of industries, as well, for over forty plus years, but government seemed to be the worst offenders to us.

MY RECOMMENDATION:Government should assure fair purchasing practices on ALL levels. Email your government representatives to tell them how you feel. You will be surprised what a flurry of emails can do to change their minds! Each email counts – more than you would ever guess!

3. Here’s how to email your Washington Township Trustee and Board: (The new WT Government Center interior was built without bidding because “the landlord chose the contractors”. Baloney: I’ll bet that the lease could have had a clause allowing WT Administrators to choose the contractors by open bidding. But that didn’t happen. I wonder how much input Trustee Short had in recommending the contractors to the landlord… Also a number of positions have been filled without posting notices of job openings to the public. POOR management, IMHO.

Big hat tip to Diana Vice for her continued relentless exposure of contract bid schemes in Indiana.

Please tune into her blog to read about roofing bid schemes at Washington Township Schools and IndyGo which exhaustively details a plot to write roofing specifications that puts Indiana based Firestone roofing out of the competition in favor of Ohio-based Tremco.

Does it ever end? I know one thing, it won't without public oversight and transparency.

Thanks, Diana, for the hard work you do for us, sometimes at great personal risk.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

I've been paying very close attention to the 10 year treasury bond rate since the current economic meltdown started taking hold. As the Federal Reserve began massively printing money, essentially doubling the money supply in the last four months of 2008 alone, it occurred to me (and anyone else with a casual understanding of economics) that a couple of things must happen:

(1) bond yields will need to significantly increase in order to find buyers for the increased supply and risk of U.S. treasury bonds [ie: our government's borrowings].

(2) the value of the U.S. Dollar must fall relative to more stable currencies that are expanding at a slower rate [ie: Euro is bad comparison, I suggest evaluating dollar value against a basket of world currencies]

As with many things in economics, timing is always difficult to guess and even though you know the treasury rate must increase, other actions the government may take or human beings (and the markets) reaction to conditions and such is always difficult to guess ... but the long-term outcome is undeniable.

Instead of immediately rising, treasury rates (10 year) dropped to as low as 2.08%. Of course, this happened as I incredulously told people it was going the wrong way and HAD to go to 4 or 5 percent and then probably, and potentially much, higher.

The challenge here is that as people dumped their stock market investments and moved their holdings into what are historically considered "safe" government bonds, the demand drove up the price of the bonds. Understanding that bonds trade like stocks and can increase and decrease in price which affects the net percentage income you can derive from them, this made the bond's "effective interest rate" lower. So people may have been paying $1080 for a bond that pays 3% on $1,000. Thus, another asset bubble was created by the Federal Reserve intervening in the economy.

Now, the government is having trouble finding enough buyers for the massive amount of borrowing it is doing and that is driving the price of those $1,000 bonds DOWN. So, now anyone who bought those bonds at prices at $1,000 or higher, thinking they were "safe" is sitting on bonds worth $930. What this also means is that the interest rate our government is having to pay on 10 year debt (just to use this example) is now approaching 4% and is continuing to spike. In fact, it should rise past 4% pretty easily and quickly at this point.

At the same time, the government is planning to intentionally devalue our currency so as to "buy down" the value of its debts. Unfortunately, this also "buys down" the value of your savings, essentially creating a different kind of tax, and to the extent that it increases the dollar value of your home and other assets, you ultimately get taxed on the "inflation portion" should you sell assets and derive income from such. (ie: inflation rises over a period of time by 20%, your equity investments go up 40% ... you pay taxes on the 40% increase, not the 20% "REAL" increase - another reason the Income Tax is a terrible way to extract revenue from citizens).

The long and short of this is that our government is going to have to pay increasingly higher interest rates on ever increasing debt. Remember, "...trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see..." ? Without looking it up, I believe in 2007 the U.S. Government paid around $420 billion in interest on the debt. Imagine the interest rate on that doubling while the debt increases by ever more trillions of dollars. The personal income tax brought in around $1.1 trillion that year, which means we could very quickly see every penny of income tax revenue going to nothing but the Interest on our government's debt.

And you wonder why libertarians and other fiscal conservatives keep saying government is out of control, spending is out of control and we can't afford the programs we have now, much less new ones like national health care. Even if you raised the tax rate to 100% on EVERYBODY you wouldn't be able to collect enough money in a decade to pay our current and future obligations.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Could it be that The People and policy makers of our fair city really do read the blogs?

At an April 16th special public convention of our Indianapolis City Council desperate to learn about the unexplainable income shortfall and potential remedies for the CIB's inability to meet its obligations, Bob Grand publicly testified that the blogs have no influence on Indianapolis policy by asserting that no one reads them.

We, Indy's bloggers, beg to differ. Here's what Republican attorney Gary Welsh, publisher of the Advance Indiana blog, reported that confrontational night six weeks ago at City Hall in a very detailed post he titled "About that CIB meeting tonight."

Welsh writes,

"Grand says he has acknowleged his position and has sometimes abstained from votes to avoid any conflict. And to the suggestion that he step aside, he said, "I strongly disagree." He referred to "aspersions" cast on blogs that "not many people read." That brought jeers from some in the meeting room. Grand was there, at least. The Pacers and the Colts declined the committee's invitation to attend the meeting."

Today Terry Burns, publisher of the Indianapolis Times blog, reports that Governor Daniels, together with Mayor Ballard, are soon to announce the removal of Bob Grand as Chairman of the Capital Improvement Board (CIB).

City Councilor-At-Large Ed Coleman was our first elected public respecting official with enough kahunas to publicly ask for Bob Grand's resignation as Chairman of the CIB.

HFFT, Advance Indiana, and WIBC each documented City Councilor Coleman's move to be first to call for for Grand's resignation.

Hat tip to Indy's bloggers and to WIBC for reporting Coleman's courage. We're sure that more city councilors in the future will follow his lead in putting The People first, regardless of the pressure of insider politics and party.

Hat tip to Terry Burns, publisher of Indianapolis Times for breaking the story today. Burns writes:

"Daniels and Ballard have agreed to get rid of Grand by dismantling the existing CIB and turning over the responsiblity of running Lucas Oil Stadium, Conseco Fieldhouse and the Indiana Convention Center to either a newly configured agency or to an expanded Indianapolis-Marion County Building Authority. We also hear that there's a possibility of "outsourcing" management of the current CIB facilities."

HFFT is concerned about the potential accountability of a "newly configured agency" and "an expanded Indianapolis-Marion County Building Authority".

Together with the best of Indiana's blogger insiders, we will endeavor to keep, you-alleged-non-blog-readers, informed first.

Andy Horning speaks at the first property tax protestGovernor's Mansion, July 4th 2007

Our loss is a gain for the state of Texas! Here's the press release sent today regarding Andy Horning's departure from Indiana to accept a job in Texas. --Melyssa for HFFT

Longtime Face of the Party, Andy Horning, Leaves IndianaSadly, the face of the LPIN for the last 10 years is leaving Indiana for Texas. Andy Horning and his family are leaving Freedom, Indiana for a new job. Andy is available for interviews on in the coming days via phone at 812-585-0504 on his accomplishments, his future, and the current state of politics and government.

The LPIN will have a going away party for Andrew Horning. At that event, Horning will have media availability for the final time in Indiana.

"I am a Libertarian because of Andy Horning," said Executive Director Chris Spangle. "Andy is the first person in my life that explained that citizens are in charge of the government, and that I may need to pull it's leash a little harder. He challenged the way I thought about governing. I am not alone. For most of the current active members in the Libertarian Party of Indiana, Andy was the first representative of our party they were exposed to. Our explosive growth and strength the last decade is in large part due to Andy's statewide candidacies."

Former State Chair Todd Singer had this to say:"Andy has run for the positions of State Representative-District 96 (1996), Marion County Recorder (1998), Mayor of Indianapolis (1999), Governor (2000), 7th District of Congress (2002), and Governor once again (2008) under the Libertarian banner. He is a strong candidate that has represented us well in the media, and in person. He is especially adept at inspiring and energizing younger voters with his message of freedom, personal responsibility, and Constitutional government."

"Time and time again, Andy is cited as the first introduction Hoosiers have had to the Libertarian Party of Indiana, and also the original intent of our Constitution, the rule of law. Andy Horning is one of the main reasons that I became a Libertarian."

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

What: Metropolitan Development Commission Public HearingWhy: Proposed $20 million to give to Kosene & Kosene DevelopersWhere: City County Building - 2nd Floor Public Assembly RoomWhen: Wednesday, June 3rd @ 1pm

Yep, this is short notice, but we need you to spend your lunch hour at the City County building Wednesday at 1pm to raise hell with the Metropolitan Development Commission. The MCD is a board of non-elected appointees who are itching to spend your money again.

Even though the CIB is coming up $47 million short without raising taxes, our so-called "People's Mayor" Ballard thinks we've got $20 million to give to a private real estate developer!

The city wants to give away another $20 million of your money to Kosene & Kosene, to develop property near the old MSA site. Kosene & Kosene is known as a pay-to-play developer according to Indy Star reporter John Ketzenberger's sources. Who knows what Kosene and Ballard's people are doing behind the scenes to get this deal moving so quickly.

HFFT has begun to alert the media who will likely be there. Make sure you are there and together we can stop this by making a big stink in public about it!

Monday, June 1, 2009

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy".

Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper to their masters.

Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.

Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "freeman" whimper.So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

The Consumption Tax That Does Make SenseFriday, May 29, 2009By: Ken Hoagland

The recent trial balloon out of perennially cash-hungry Washington testing whether Americans would abide a European style Value Added Tax is suffering the same fate as the doomed Hindenberg. The sooner this idea crashes and burns, the better. The proposed VAT would be added on top of the badly broken income tax, increasing American's tax burden and hiding even more federal taxes from plain sight. Yet another hidden federal tax would take the nation in exactly the wrong direction.

There is, however, a consumption tax that restores the proper relationship between citizen and government, brings about a new era of American economic growth and cuts the Gordian knot of complexity, unfairness and damage to our economy caused by our own tax system. Most significantly, this consumption tax, called the FairTax, reveals the price tag of federal spending to taxpayers picking up the tab. The most compelling virtue of the FairTax, in fact, may be that it turns every consumer in the United States into a "stakeholder" who will finally pressure politicians to limit spending. For this reason and because it strips Congress of the ability to manipulate the tax code for power and profit, the FairTax finds stiff opposition inside Washington and growing support outside the beltway.

Advocates for pending FairTax legislation rail against the destructive effects and corrupted application of the income tax system. They point to trillions of dollars of private investment that are expected to flow into the United States with elimination of corporate and capital gains taxes. They love the idea of illegal immigrants and the entire underground economy joining the tax base. They endorse the idea of an universal monthly "prebate" to offset the tax on the necessities of life which eliminates federal taxes on the poor and provides the middle class with dramatic tax reductions. And they like the idea of a simple, visible tax on consumption that entirely replaces the income tax system, freeing work, savings and investment from the hobbling effect of such taxes.

But it is the medicine for the Achilles heel of our democracy that may prove the most compelling strength of the FairTax. Our Founding Fathers warned that when, in a democracy, the public discovers that it can vote itself wealth from the public treasury, self-government may destroy the economic foundation of the nation. Many would argue that cynically ambitious candidates and elected officials have been buying votes with the public treasury for years.

Top economists across the nation helped design the FairTax and have proved that it can replace all revenues now collected under the income tax system. Under the FairTax, every retail purchase of new goods and services is subject to federal taxation. The tax paid at the cash register is visible, unlike taxes that are now hidden through payroll withholding and embedded within the price of goods and services. The FairTax visibly connects federal spending to earnings. Today, by contrast, massive spending for entitlements, stimulus projects, pet projects and every other government program seems like “free money” to a lot of voters. One need only look at the courting of the powerful senior citizen’s block of voters, or the growth of “earmarks” to understand the siren song of such promises both to elected officials and to the body politic. Neither voters nor politicians have been able to resist spending beyond our means.

The effect is destructive as politicians from both parties have taken us down a path of unsustainable debt. Some economists cite current and obligated future government debt at the local, state and federal level as so large that it threatens the “full faith and credit” of the United States.

Our destructive answer has been to spend even more by borrowing more from foreign creditors—both to assuage public fears and to address real problems. We are now immorally spending the earnings of our children and grandchildren on both the current challenges of our modern society and the politically popular wishes of entrenched interest groups across the political spectrum. The other primary answer from national leaders has been to collect less by legislating tax cuts in the legitimate hope that lower taxes will spur investment. If we were not already in such deep debt, the debate between the two sides might make sense and a rational middle ground might be achieved. But with more than $11 trillion of national debt, a looming Social Security IOU for tens of trillions more and $40-60 trillion of debt at the state and local level, this argument begins to look a lot like zealots endlessly arguing over whether to bake bread or grow wheat while standing in the middle of a long-parched desert.

Under the income tax system our earnings belong first to the federal government with only the remainder belonging to the citizen. Payroll withholding and direct taxation of earnings turns the whole notion of the American citizen as sovereign on its head and creates a nation of citizens--and now their offspring-- working first for our government. The FairTax restores the role of the citizen by insisting that what we earn belongs first to us and only through our consumption decisions is money then provided for the common good. Most significantly, it makes clear to every American the cost of government promises and programs. In this, the FairTax may prove not just a far better tax system but the best way to both strengthen our economy and provide needed medicine to our Republic.